Greece
Greece is a country in Southern Europe centered on a peninsula south of the Balkans and the surrounding islands in the Aegean Sea, the Ionian Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. Civilization in Greece goes back to the time of the Mycenean Era of 1600 BC. Mycenean civilization reached its height around the time the the Trojan War of circa 1200 BC, and fell under the impact of the Dorian Invasion of 1100 BC. After a dark age lasting several centuries during which the Greeks spread to the coast of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, and Sicily, civilization revived in the eighth century BC. The new Greek civilization was that of the Classical Era of city-states including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Political disunion among the Greek city-states led to incessant internal warfare, although the city-states were able to fend off the growing might of the Persian Empire in the fifth century BC. The century ended in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Continued internal warfare in the fourth century BC ended with the Macedonian conquest of the Greek city-states under Philip II and Alexander the Great, and Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire. Alexander's death in 323 BC led to the collapse of his empire, and the Greeks became part of a larger Hellenistic civilization stretching from Sicily to Central Asia. The Hellenistic age ended in the second century BC with the revival of the Persian Empire in the east and the rise of the Roman Empire in the west. The Greeks were conquered by the Romans, but the greater wealth and population of the eastern Greek-speaking areas of the Empire shifted the balance of power there. By the fourth century of the Christian Era the center of power in the Roman Empire shifted permanently to the Greek city of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. The fall of the Western Empire to Germanic barbarians in the fifth century left the Greeks dominant in what is now called the Byzantine Empire. The Empire suffered the permanent loss of much of its territory in Asia and North Africa during the Arab conquests of the seventh century, and was left fragmented by the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 by Western Europeans. The Byzantine Empire, including the Greeks, were conquered by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The Greeks remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire at the time of the North American Rebellion in the 1770s. However, the Ottoman Empire had been suffering a steady decline in power since the failed Siege of Vienna in 1683, and sometime in the nineteenth century the Greeks established an independent state. This Greek state was allied with France in the early twentieth century, most likely in response to an alliance between the Ottoman Empire and the Germanic Confederation. By the time of the Global War, the Ottoman Empire was allied with Great Britain, while the Germans intervened in support of the Arab Revolt of 1939. Although Sobel does not specifically say so, it is likely that the Greeks aided the Germans in their conquest of the Ottoman Empire in 1940. Greece would have remained a German ally through the rest of the Global War, and likely would have been rewarded with expanded territory in western Asia Minor, and possibly even control of Constantinople. Greece presumably remains allied with the German Empire in 1971. Greece does not have an entry in Sobel's index. Category:Nations of Europe Category:Subjects with no index entry